Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday January 01, 2012 @03:36PM
from the when-that-lining-isnt-silver dept.

turing0 writes "As a former bioinformatics researcher and CTO I have some sad news to start 2012 with. Though I am sure not a surprise to the Slashdot crowd, it appears we — or our demographic — made up more than 75% of the Google Health userbase. Today marks the end of Google Health. (Also see this post for the official Google announcement and lame excuse for the reasoning behind this myopic decision.) The decision of Google to end this excellent service is a fantastic example of what can represent the downside of cloud services for individuals and enterprises. The cloud is great when and while your desired application is present — assuming it's secure and robust — but you are at the mercy of the provider for longevity." (Read more, below.)

turing0 continues:
"I am surprised to see Google abandoning Google Health just when we can see the benefit to personal health when micro sensors such as the Nike Plus and Jawbone's UP bracelet are entering the market. Greater amounts of personal health data can be gathered now via smartphone and then turned into valuable preventative as well as useful diagnostic medical information.

Shuttering Google Health is a surprising and short-sighted decision on Google's behalf, IMHO. Perhaps closing the Google Health service is not 'Evil' per se — but given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs. Services like Google Health are a fantastic public relations tool as well as an amazing potential source of raw scientific data if nothing else.

In closing, it's very funny to note Google suggests Google Health users migrate GH data to the Microsoft Health Vault. Hopefully some Web service other than Health Vault will rise from the ashes of Google Health. The real benefit in terms of Google being a custodian of my health and wellness records via Google Health was that Google as a corporation is considered a trustworthy intermediary by most users and health care professionals. Now I am not so sure; perhaps it's time to re-claim my email ..."

Another day, another Google service bites the dust. At this rate, they're set to outdo Microsoft in the number of obsoleted APIs and services that they use to pull the rug out from under people. And why shouldn't they? We're not the customers. Advertisers are, and if a service isn't helping Google's advertisers, they're not interested in keeping it around.

At this rate, they're set to outdo Microsoft in the number of obsoleted APIs and services that they use to pull the rug out from under people.

Oh, you don't think Microsoft maintains ENOUGH legacy support? Wow. I don't think there's anybody out there who supports as much legacy hardware and as many legacy APIs as Microsoft. In fact I think that's the key to their niche in marketplace - it takes tens of thousands of programmers to carry as much cruft as they do, which is hard to duplicate.

Microsoft (or rather Bing) does tend to launch counters to pretty much every Google service and then proceed to refuse to close them when Google closes theirs. Translate API is another example of that.

When I was working for a pharmacy chain back in 2007/08ish, and I got to see a presentation on Google Heath at a conference. Our software provider was partnering with Google to import all your prescription information into Google Health in real time. At the time the idea of being able to have several different pharmacies, doctor offices, and hospitals put your information into a central "electronic health record" was being pushed by Obama's campaign to lower health care costs and save lives. There was money to be had.

Of course this would be an extremely valuable service for Google, but medical industry is very powerful and clouded by federal laws. As we move forward, electronic health records are still right around the corner and someone will make all the money. I doubt there will be more then one private entity storing your data, but then again it could be like Medicare D and you have to choose from 20+ companies.

(By the way, the presentation on Google Health was the best and most professional presentation I've ever seen. They hire pros for real.)

Very good point!But just about any entity that deals with Medicare is a covered entity. And if even one of those covered entities submits PHI to Google, directly, then they would have to obtain a "HIPAA Business Associate" contract with Google.

I can't wait for the P2P age. To hell with the cloud. A solid P2P network where people can set up services with even more ease than we do now (Tor) will be so much better than this crappy age of the internet.

I agree with you 110%. It has to happen, because all we seem to be doing now is recentralizing everything the Internet (and personal computing in general) promised to liberate.

Of course, we can expect the coming "P2P age" to be fought as if it the Nazis had allied with the Mongol hordes and were invadi

The load of money they have moving contains quite a few secrets which together make everything, very, very unpredictable. They tell us one thing and do other. Call me paranoid, but keep an eye out for any low-profit services that you use because you never really know when they are going to be shut down. Whether a huge company running it or not.

One way of interpreting the decision is that Google is finding it hard to make money off tech-savvy people (who probably use adblockers and can tell the difference between sponsored links and actual search results, etc).

In the end, while we weren’t able to create the impact we wanted with Google Health, we hope it has raised the visibility of the role of the empowered consumer in their own care.

Considering the fact that I - somebody who in many ways spends more time on the Internet than off it - have not heard about this interesting service until today, I seriously doubt that the problem is that there haven't been enough takers. Yes, it sounds a touch megalomaniacal. But my conclusion is that Google has simply just not raised awareness about this product. With the amount of faeces being thrown all over the interwebz for other products such as Google Plus, I dare say that a small fraction of the resources expended could have saved initiatives such as Google Health from flatlining...

From what little I've found, it looks like G+ could adsorb google health and keep on going? Much like contacts and profiles and blogger and latitude and probably other stuff have kind of merged in.

I'd be careful, though, with which circles get which posts. Maybe the mighty goog is rolling out tagged data, like data input as medical records can only be read by people tagged as medical professionals...

I seriously doubt that the problem is that there haven't been enough takers. Yes, it sounds a touch megalomaniacal. But my conclusion is that Google has simply just not raised awareness about this product.

As a former user of the service, I'm actually not that surprised.

Out of all the health services I was personally using, the only service that reliably plugged into it was my Walgreens pharmacy. Of course, my doctor could have used it himself, but I didn't even ask. Ever since I've migrated to the US from France, I've given up asking non-French doctors to fill out my medical blue book (my medical blue book contains all the medical records I've had since I was a baby, I do not know if they still use it in France now, but I love having all my medical information summarized and centralized in one thing that I actually have control over).

For me Google Health was just like a big empty spreadsheet that I needed to fill out manually (except for my medication information which could get automatically imported from my pharmacy). I just didn't see any immediate pay off in taking the time of entering that data in it. May be, if I ever have a kid, it might be cool to start keeping something like that from the very first day of his birth (or even sooner, by recording the prenatal care the mother is given), to later give it to him for his information, but for me personally, it just isn't worth it unless my insurance or my doctor's office started participating in it as well (otherwise, I'd just end up duplicating a lot of information manually without a real reason for it otherwise, or just start using something like Excel/Google Docs instead).

Had never heard of it (despite using a lot of Labs stuff).Nobody I asked had ever heard of it.Wouldn't use it if I had.Nobody I asked would have used if it they had.Nothing that can't be replicated elsewhere, by the look of it.

You can bias the summary as much as you like and call it a myopic decision but I'd much rather they spent the money on something I'm likely to use or see being used at least.

If an ENTIRE Google service can pass myself, and others just as technical, by until its closure then it's quite

Web-based services (aka, 'Cloud' services) are convenient and have a lot of advantages (which I won't repeat here unless asked).

One big thing is that the server-side has all the control. I find this great for me as a service provider. This is one reason companies love providing these services.

However, as a user of various services I realise I have no control. If the services I rely on were to disappear tomorrow there is nothing I can do about it and I'm totally powerless to stop it. The service provided may even be profitable for a provider but if it is not proftable *enough*, or there are cost cutting mesures being done by corporate head-office then the service can be axed. Even if the service is critcal to my business

So the lesson to be learned is the same point made by the Free Software advocates. If software is critical to yourself or your business then you must ensure you have complete *control* of the software, all the way down to having the right to modify the source code if you need to. The convience of web-based services will never compensate for the loss of control. It is a strategic business decision to make: control (the long-term strategic view) or convenience (the short-term tactical view). I fully expect lots of sob stories like this to appear until the vendors start pitching back to CIOs that they could regain control by bringing stuff in-house again (for a fee, of course). Using Cloud services is no different to the 'offshoring' fad that the wise avoided for critical capabilities, followed by the realision that it doesn't always work and the resulting 'onshoring' renormalization. Expect a term like 'in-housing' or something similar to appear in trade rags in a couple of years.

Whatever you do: don't lose control of your critical software and services (and use Free Software!).

I'd rather they PGP email, or mail-drop an encrypted statement every month than park it on their site (and wait for me to remember to download it) for the amount of money they're making off me every month.

I've been an avid user of Google Health for a couple years now. Since the decision to end the service was announced, I've attempted numerous times to find some sense of replacement from HealthVault. HealthVault is a great service, but its hardly equivalent. For instance, HealthVault is merely a storage system for your raw data, and to view it or continue to keep track of it, you have to utilize other services (such as through the Mayo Clinic) with which HV interfaces to manage. It has a lot of possibility, in that you can utilize many specialized services from many different places, however it fails at keeping the experience seemless. You always know that you are leaving to a new site, and often times go through redundant logins and registrations.

Google Health however kept everything restricted to a couple pages. Your blood pressure measurements, weights and other vitals were displayed in concise graphs The greatest strength of Google Health was its stripped down visuals and your ability to create your own trackers for virtually any metric. I used it to keep track of my migraine headaches in hopes of finding a trend which would reveal possible triggers. Some of the services, such as the Mayo Clinic's personal health manager, which use HealthVault offer similar customization, but they are very stripped down, the interfaces are clunky and, once again, it takes an annoying amount of log-in's and desperate clicking to get into the service.

I wish Google would just release the source, so that someone else could construct their own version. I for one would. I loved it.

I used it to keep track of my migraine headaches in hopes of finding a trend which would reveal possible triggers.

Have you tried taking wheat gluten out of your diet for a month? My wife had a lot of problems with both migraines and chronic fatigue syndrome; taking gluten out of her diet pretty much fixed it. Getting rid of caffeine also helped. The only problem is that so much food has gluten in it that it's hard to get away from it, but there's more and more gluten-free stuff coming out, and many rest

Yes, there's a bunch of products where they're slapping "gluten-free" on the packaging even though the product never had gluten to begin with. They're trying to cash in on the craze with people who want gluten-free but are ignorant of what kinds of foods contain gluten (mostly anything made with wheat, barley, or rye: bread, pasta, etc.). However, it's not all bad: there's a surprising number of foods out there that you wouldn't immediately suspect to contain wheat, but if you look on the ingredients list

The concept of Google having any access to health information is frightening, to say the least. They already have way too much information about way too many things for way too many of us, already.

I have a feeling I am not alone in this feeling about the Google overlords and this might have contributed to the non-popularity of Google Health. And no, I wouldn't want to give health information to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, or Microsoft either!

Let's put all medical info on the internet, publicly accessible. Let's include DNA sequences and video of all medical procedures. This would be wonderful for accountability (billing fraud, malpractice, etc.) and research. It would increase continuity of care, particularly when you show up unconscious far away from your normal care provider. It would cut down on the spread of disease, especially if we added mandatory testing for disease: you can look on the internet to see if your date has an STD. It would c

Yeah, I guess the concept of privacy just has no meaning to modern society. One could/would never be prejudged by those with access to such information, or be a victim of unfair discrimination. There could never be misleading or incorrect information about someone in such a system.

I think Gattaca should be compulsory viewing these days. It was a bit unrealistic - a government with that much power not abusing it??

And Google themselves are turning evil for much the same reason.

We'll soon be in the age of aborting perfectly health foetuses because they have addiction genes, or cancer genes. And people want to trust Google et al on not selling this information to potential employees or health insurers?

Turing0, how much were you paying for your Google Health? what service guarantee did you get for your paid contract with them? Oh, $0 and nothing. Quit your whining, so a free trial balloon was cancelled, pony up some bucks for an equivalent service with a vendor and then you'll have a right to complain about service or lack thereof.

There's a difference between "whining" and "publicizing". If a company like Google starts pulling the plug on service after service, even if I didn't use those services, it's important to me to know, so I can decide how dependable the services I DO use, are. Every time Google turns the lights out on another service.. Wave, Knol, Health, etc, I start to have second thoughts about Gmail, Picasa, Reader, etc. And it's also a big reason why I'm not buying in to Google+.

This isn't specific to the cloud. This is one of the risks when you put anything crucial to the existence of your business completely in the hands of a single other entity. It could be as basic as having a sole source for a part that you have to have available to manufacture your product. If that supplier goes out of business or discontinues that part, you're SOL. And since you don't have any control over them, you can't do anything about the situation. Your only recourse is what every businessman has known

Seriously. I never recommend to my customers that they rely on "cloud services". In the last year or so, even Amazon and other services have gone down, taking innumerable websites offline for unpredictable amounts of time.

Just recently, an Amazon server went down, and a customer was notified that their site was down and that they had 48 hours to save the site or it would be gone... and they received the notice about 24 hours after that 48 hours had already expired.

Other people I know have had other, similar experiences.

My advice to customers is: DO NOT make your business dependent on the performance of "services" over which your have no control. You are putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, and that's just plain a Bad Idea. And that includes everything from depending on Google Apps to sites on EC2.

Seriously. I never recommend to my customers that they rely on "cloud services". In the last year or so, even Amazon and other services have gone down, taking innumerable websites offline for unpredictable amounts of time.

Indeed. It's far better to rely on your own servers - after all, they never go down.

There are two issues here: first, many sites are dependent on more than one external service to work. Maybe they're hosted on EC2 and load all their javascript from google.com or jquery.org.

All they are doing is multiplying their possible points of failure.

Second, if your own server goes down, YOU can decide what to do about it. You don't have to sit around in the dark waiting for somebody else to get around to it... if they ever do. (Like the Amazon inc

You do realize that there are "services" that 99.9999% of the population must rely on. Like WAN/Network Services. I believe people were using the term "WAN Cloud" well before the term was applied to server/application clouds.

Dunno about you but the company that I work for (very large IT company), doesn't own all the dark fibre in between it's world wide sites and leases quite a few WAN circuits from various telco providers.

Because it's not your server, and you are completely at the mercy of some other company.

If your server goes down, you can do something about it. You can decide what your priorities are, and act accordingly. If somebody else's server goes down, they decide what their priorities are, and you may not be among them.

For example: I know of a site that is served from the Amazon "cloud", requires a Yahoo login, and its email, which is essential to th

At least you can control it and have it fixed/replaced. Good luck getting cloud services provided by Google or Amazon back up once they have determined not to support them anymore and to take them off of the "cloud".

Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault's personal health records (PHRs) are well known in health IT circles, but even among the health IT and healthcare informatics professionals I work with, uptake has been very shallow. There have been connected PHR-enabled sensors available for weight, blood pressure, blood glucose, and many other biometrics for some time, but again, very little interest in flowing this data into stand alone PHRs.

Stand alone PHRs aren't the only way to facilitate doctor-patient interaction. Many leading electronic medical records systems (EMRs) offer integrated personal health records - the disadvantage being that these records only show the data from one provider or health care system. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are rapidly springing up across the country to facilitate provider to provider data integration and provide a compelling model for direct patient participation in their care.

Personally, I've tracked these services for years but I've never bothered to create an account. Entering my information manually is tedious, and the standards and integration between EMRs and stand-along PHRs is emerging at best. If I had a fully populated PHR, it's not clear what value I'd really get out of it. My main provider already has most of my information and can source information directly from other practices when needed. Doctors are culturally suspicious of patient submitted data, as they have concerns about amateur self-diagnosis and drug-seeking patients.

The way Google is winding this down increases my trust in their other services. Google announced their plan to shutter Google Health a year and a half before the final shutdown date. They're offering multiple data export and migration options, including instructions and support to migrate to their largest competitor, HealthVault. I've had significantly worse experiences with migration / upgrade of many paid services / software - I'm looking at you Intuit.

I am a full-time software engineer working in Health IT, specialising in in-hospital cross-system integration. Our business is accepting the data feeds from lab systems, radiology systems, ED information systems, and patient administration systems, and then present the results as a cohesive single health record.

Well, you'd think standards and compliance would make it easy, but that assumes when people say they meet the standard... they ACTUALLY meet the standard. Format is one thing, but ensuring corre

I'm surprised that nobody noticed it: Google is stopping all its future innovations, and concentrate on short-term revenues, which is a decision from their CEO, not by the cost of maintaining the current tools (it's a very small cost).

McNerney focused on using Six Sigma, and improving productivity.3M, based on a culture of innovation since 100 years, had its internal culture almost destroyed in only 5 years.

The inventor of post-it said that it would have been impossible that the "post-it" concept would have been successful using the new method.

In my opinion, it's a very short-sighted decision, as you can see with Microsoft and IBM, which invest a lot of money in innovation.It's impossible to predict what will work in a few years, and I doubt that the current monopoly of Google on Internet ads will long very last.

Now, let me give a prediction:currently, Apple and Google are ranked 1st and 2nd as the most innovative companies.I bet that in 2 years, they won't be in the top 10 anymore.

This has happened in many American and western companies, at a grossly accelerating pace in recent years. Useless fucking business management droids don't have a clue what makes a society flourish, and they can do a lot to destroy it.

No, it's not because of capitalism, since IBM and Microsoft are probably even more capitalist than Google or Apple.It's a human decision.Do you focus on your next quarter, or do you see farther ?

Google encouraged its employees to work 20% of their time on innovation. Now, I'm sure that this is no more the case.

Google is taking the easiest route, and when you stop taking risks, you don't create anymore.The option "let's cut all useless expenses" is necessary only when you are in big financial trouble, otherwise, it's just plainly stupid.

Google has a dual class stock structure.Sergey Brin & Larry Page control 48% of the voting shares and they're rich enough that they don't have to care about the next quarter.If Google is shutting down projects, it's because that's what the two top dogs want. No one has the votes to tell them how to run the company.

I can agree 100% with this, and as someone who survived a GE acquisition, I feel the pain. Luckily, GE bought us to acquire some of our other technology units and we were sold off after a couple years. But, during the years we were under GE, innovation stagnated. We learned that GE really stands for "good enough". Our GE tenure put us 3-4 years behind the competition, taking into account the catch-up scenario we were left with after separation from GE.

Innovation is not about taking a single idea and pushing it until it works.Innovation is about taking a lot of ideas, and see what is viable.I see that you don't know the story behind post-it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postit [wikipedia.org] Fry explained that you have one very successful idea out of 5000 concepts.

Google's goal is to aggregate all the knowledge in the world, so why do they close useful search services, like codesearch ?http://google.com/codesearch [google.com] If a project needs a large team t

That also means that everyone loses trust in Google's services. They just seem to cancel anything anytime they want. There was an earlier discussion about Native Client. Who's to say Google won't just drop it? Even Microsoft offers very specific end-of-lifecycle dates and they're always several years in to the future. With every version, too!

I won't be trusting Google's services to stay up, and hence won't be using them either. I only use the ones I can afford to end randomly, like search and youtube.

Google gave plenty of notice of the EOL of this service, and it's chief problem was that there was no sponsorship and nobody willing to pay for the service. Google was an unneeded middleman if health records, better records are collected by doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, and other health professionals.

It would have been nice if they would have released the source code for the service under some sort of open license. There's definitely a need for a service like that, it's just a question of whether it makes any sense for Google to provide it or not. I'm sure there are plenty of organizations that would have been willing to adopt it for their own use.

It's offensive how this works. Take my X-rays for example. My surgeon sent me some place to get them done. He's the one with a clue; they just take pictures. Despite this, they insist on having me wait for some on-staff radiologist to "interpret" the X-rays. They claim state law requires this. (if so, surely because they lobbied for it) Then I'm not allowed to truly own the images, physically or by copyright, and neither is my surgeon. (again by state law, which they surely lobbied for) I'm allowed to borrow the X-rays, taking them to my surgeon so he can see them. I'm sternly warned that I'm violating some law if I don't bring them back. WTF, is somebody covering the storage costs? Fortunately I didn't see a due date, so I'm still "borrowing" my own damn X-rays a decade later and I don't remember who the "owner" is. If I had foolishly been a good boy and returned them, I'd currently have no possible way to access them. The X-rays would be gone, preventing future surgeons from being able to compare them with newer X-rays or being able to make an initial guess before ordering new X-rays.

The same goes for the dentist. IMHO, it's a racket to encourage repeat business. Come back to us, or you suffer extra X-ray exposure and it won't even be covered by your insurance.

That's weird. I live in AZ, and I recently had a CT scan done. They gave me a CD-R of all the images before I walked out the door, and I loaned that to my surgeon to take a look at (along with the radiologist report). I still have the disc, so I'm the "owner" of the images.

As for my dentist, we'll see when I move out of state if my dentist will transfer my records to my new dentist. He's a pretty nice guy and I suspect he will, but I don't know for sure yet.

It does help, however, to check out your doctors before doing any business with them. Look them up on Google Maps and see if there's any reviews written about them. Shy away from anyone with negative reviews. Before seeing my current surgeon, I had a visit with a competing one, and what a jerk he was, and his office staff was utterly incompetent, mixing up my records with some other patients' (one bimbo said this was a recurring problem for them). I canceled all future visits and found my present surgeon who's great, but I looked up the first one and found a bunch of bad reviews complaining about the office staff etc. I added my own too.

This is the problem with Electronic Health Records (EHR). Everybody has their own system for keeping records, and Google Health was just an extra patient-controlled database that needed custom bridging just like everything else. HL7 (Health Layer 7) is supposed to be the solution, but with it's constantly changing spec (2.x was pipe-delimited, 3.x will be XML if they ever finish it...) nobody likes to use it.

It's offensive how this works. Take my X-rays for example. My surgeon sent me some place to get them done. He's the one with a clue; they just take pictures. Despite this, they insist on having me wait for some on-staff radiologist to "interpret" the X-rays. They claim state law requires this.

I had xrays done, and the on-site radiologist discovered the cracked vertebrae immediately and got me rushed to get an MRI which showed the problem in more detail. If they've simply punted it to the doctor, it would have been hours (and likely end-of-business-come-again-tomorrow) before the doctor would have seen them.

Since then, I had my hand xray'd following a fracture - there the radiologist wasn't so much checking for the fracture (I told them up front about that one), but to verify the quality of the pictures before they are given to the doctor.

Ok! You used a words with a negative connotations to prove your point. Try with logic except for emotional rambling.1. A Surgeon isn't a Radiologist. Surgeons are trained to work inside the body. a Radiologist are trained to analyze imaging. If the Surgeon goes a head and makes an Analysis off of say an X-Ray image and makes a mistake. He will get sued for malpractice, and he should, he doesn't have the training to understand the information. Surgeons know the body in a 3d view, Radiologists know it in a 2

Microsoft makes most of their money selling things for which end users, be they businesses or individuals, pay real money. Microsoft Office, Xbox, stuff like that. Their customers are their users. Microsoft's aggressive activity is generally aimed at competitors.

Google sells ads, and information about and access to their users. Google's customers are almost entirely (94% of revenue) advertisers. Google's aggressive activity is aimed at their users. When Microsoft got into serious legal trouble, it was over their behavior towards competitors. When Google got into serious legal trouble, it was about their behavior towards users. See the DOJ non-prosecution agreement in the pharmacy case. [googlemonitor.com]

Citation necessary. Google sells ad space, they do not sell information about users, which is definitely something to keep in mind. They do not guarantee that users will read the ads nor do they guarantee that the ads will even be seen by anybody.

No, you're wrong there. Google sells access (for advertisers) to an extremely large pool of people whom use Google services. Google does not sell anything to that pool of people. While it might be slightly disingenuous to say that the pool of people is the product, they most certainly are not the customers.

It's not slightly disingenuous, it completely distorts the relationship and implies that there are things going on which aren't going on. I'm no more the product of Google than I am the product of say the New York Times print edition or the New Yorker.

Claiming that Google is selling me requires some amount of evidence that the GGP hasn't provided.

Seriously - did turing0 like this "excellent" service enough to be willing to pay for it? If so, did he ever write Google and suggest it move to a for-fee model? After all, we had quite a bit of warning this was going to happen.

Reading the rest of turing0's post, though... it's obvious what he wants is for Google to continue to provide this service at no cost to himself - "given the immense magnitude of financial resources at Google I cannot believe Google Health will make a decimal place of impact on Google's operating costs."

Heck, I'd be irritated if Google decided to discontinue Gmail - but I'd recognize it's their right to do so, given I'm not paying a dime for it (directly, anyway - and I don't believe Google Health could be contextual-ad-supported in the same way, what with FIPAA and all).

It's free, therefore they cancel it is a fallacy. Paid services also get cancelled.

It's free, so they get to encourage you to rely on it then pull the rug from under you and you have to say "thank you" is also a fallacy. My lack of payment does not mean that the provider can't do me harm.

The message is clear. Cloud services are for suckers. If you can't independently access your data and run your code, it's integrity, security and accessibility are at the whim of the hosting company.

Native Client's really hairy open-source code that does clever things with segments, page flags and static analysis of x86 code. Also, I'm not sure there's that many people outside of Google that have even ported code to it, yet alone worked on the internals.

So I found myself wondering... why do some people love it so much? Is there some specific aspect of the show that they consider well made or what?

Nah, we just really want to have a new show to rally around and identify with (like "Star Trek" once was). Its merits or lack thereof are irrelevant; It's just that is was there, not totally crap, and on prime-time TV...

Yep, just look at the OP's comment: "it was on par with Farscape". However, IIRC, Farscape was already gone when Firefly came along.

Imagine if they made a new sci-fi TV show, and sci-fi fans complained that "it's only on par with ST:TNG but with better fx". Would that not be reason alone to watch it (assuming you liked TNG)? It's not like they're still making TNG episodes after all. Do people really expect every new TV show or movie to be so much better than everything that came in the past? That's a p

I found the writing quite amusing at times, and the rest of it was good enough that I am willing to sit through it to get to the good bits.

More on topic, when a series (or product or service) is removed people will generally feel a sense of loss. If there is no similar replacement, people will tend to remember the good parts, forget the bad parts, and want to relive those halcyon days when it existed.

When something outlives its shelf life, people get used to it not being so good, and its loss isn't as much

Most likely that means it wasn't for you. I've been watching a lot of shows lately that were canceled or otherwise ended early. The State, The Tick, Brisco County, Dilbert etc., and they were good shows that for one reason or another only lasted for a season or two worth of shows. The problem ultimately is that it's hard to say at what point a show should be canceled. It's easy to assume that they'll continue indefinitely when much of the time they don't, you end up with a show like The Simpsons or Family

You say that the writing was mediocre, I'd argue that it was actually very good. The episodes did vary, however and followed an arc, so I suppose if you only saw a couple, you might not have seen it at its best.

Whedon does a great job of character interaction. Buffy interplay with a large cast by the end was amusing, Angel was a darker mood but enjoyable, and Firefly strikes me as the best example of his style. The characters had backgrounds that mattered and stories that didn't have the characters change their behavior to fit the storyline. (For example, the last few episodes of Sanctuary just was too forced with Will all of a sudden anti-Magnus, was way out of line with his character) If you've only seen a few

I liked Summer Glau's portrayal of a sensitive damaged girl with subconsciously trained fighting or psychic abilities that would kick in at random times. I also liked Sarah Conner Chronicles because I liked watching her as a terminator.

Why would people record their health care record in a service like this? I can see keeping a private record for myself but this is sensitive information that people do not want spread around. I can see the benefits of crossing this information privately and allowing health care providers access to this but there is an element of trust that must be established first. For something like this Google should have made a serious long term commitment no matter what. Anyone think political pressure may be at play o

I agree that Google should have made a long term commitment. Wasn't this one of the founder's wives' pet projects? That alone should be enough reason to focus and do it right. With one of the Google founders worried about their personal genetics and wanting to program their own genes healthcare should be getting a huge IT bonus instead it looks like they're dropping the ball. I wouldn't be surprised about political pressure. The latest health care law limits hospital competition so the per-hospital electro

The health market is almost entirely database-driven: it's all medical records of one sort or another. Patient charts, billing codes, etc: it's just databases. The database end is complex due to absurdly complicated standards, but also because systems have proprietary data stores that don't talk to other systems well. The worst part, though, is the user interfaces: most industries have UI's that don't suck, but health never seemed to get this right. The database engineers have been designing the UI's forever.

There's a brilliant market here for someone with the vision to combine Apple-quality system integration and UI with a narrow focus on the healthcare industry. Whoever does it is going to sell their product for cheaps to a bunch of doctors and become a defacto standard.

You're largely correct but the biggest problem is that even at an Enterprise level, it is a cottage industry. Everyone has different processes. What works well for one system is an absolute disaster in another. Hell, what works on one floor of a hospital doesn't work on another.

As the developer of a Patient Management System, I agree completely there. Our code is littered with location dependent workarounds for individual business units doing things differently one way or another for no apparent reason.

You're largely correct but the biggest problem is that even at an Enterprise level, it is a cottage industry. Everyone has different processes. What works well for one system is an absolute disaster in another. Hell, what works on one floor of a hospital doesn't work on another.

It's very frustrating.

Is this a US issue? How does this play out in countries with socialized medical systems? To what extent are the records centrally stored and/or standardized in other countries?

Oh you don't know. You only have to be compatible with one system. A Sun system that is older than I am, to be exact.

In fact I know one country that pays $100k for every single healthcare computer, because it's the only approved model their software runs on (which is still in development, using mainframe development tools). Today they have to be custom made one-by-one. Thank God they've at least used an emulator for the storage of things like pictures and scans, so actual hard drives can be used (well 16G,

Unfortunately, a lot of the healthcare profession is quackery. Just look at chiropractic. There might be something to it with musculoskeletal problems, but most of them claim to be able to cure all kinds of other ailments with their "adjustments". And a lot of them practice other strange offshoots like kinesiology (basically where you hold a bottle with a supplement near the patient, have him extend his arm, and push down on it and see how hard it is to push down on his outstretched arm; if they're weake